


None Must Go

by CharlotteCordelier



Category: Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, I'm always late to fandom bandwagons, M/M, anyway here's wonderwall, but I'm here now and I hope that counts for something
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-30
Updated: 2019-07-17
Packaged: 2019-12-26 17:13:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18286682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CharlotteCordelier/pseuds/CharlotteCordelier
Summary: What would have happened, if Budapest had been a different kind of disaster? A SHIELD without Hawkeye.





	1. Heart

_ “No, bury them in caves and cellars. None must go. We are going to beat them.” _

-Winston Churchill, refusing to evacuate the National Gallery’s paintings to Canada

 

**Budapest**

**2007**

What had happened was, they were out of condoms. This wasn’t, per se, a condom type mission. But many missions turned into condom type missions, and it looked like Natasha was going to need to be devastatingly charming to, at the very least, three diplomats to play them against each other. 3-D attache seduction chess was not a game that was meant to be played without condoms. Condoms, aside from the practical applications, were a great prop. A condom in your wallet embarrassed clerks, who looked away. It caught the eye of men at bars. It signaled, intent, virtue, character, sexual preference, and size. Condoms: don’t spy without them.

So, yeah. In diplomatic three-dimensional sex chess, condoms were essential. If it were Phil, and not Jasper, they would already have condoms, at least three types and from two countries of origin. But Phil had been clipped by a hit and run driver as Natasha and Clint were boarding their flight from Paris to Romania. He was fine, just a little bruised and scraped, but he was riding pine for this one. Which sucked. Phil was great at chess.

Instead, they got Sitwell. Sitwell did not read Phil’s notes and he did not bring the backup condoms or Clint’s preferred flavor of protein brick. Clint hated eating local food when he might be stuck in a nest for a day or two. It was no time to find out that the local cuisine did not agree with your colon and yes, that was a lesson he’d learned the hard way. Natasha had just begun explaining this to Sitwell, with appropriate icy embellishment, when Clint ducked out to the closest farmacie for rubbers. Hopefully he’d run into a magazin on the way back that would sell him boiled eggs or something. Sulfur farts in a nest were not ideal, but they were better than a number of potential lard and paprika alternatives Hungary had to offer.

He’d found the prophylactics, and was on the lookout for any kind of grocer, when they took him. Looking back, he knew there was nothing wrong with his situational awareness. But nobody expects the one-armed cybernetic super soldier to drop down from a fourth story roof. Or the Spanish inquisition. Clint was on the street, and then in a crushing stranglehold seeing black spots, and then he was in a moving transit van with two dead agents.

And then, Clint wasn’t Hawkeye anymore. He wasn’t even Clint.

Matti Niemi, Agent of SHIELD (Level Two) died in the back of a transit van, next to his coworker Isabel Vasquez (Level Four). Clint found their bodies in the dark, breathing shallowly as he waited for his eyes to adjust. They were dead, but he was alive. He was running through the implications, but smelling their blood in the dark, he knew he wasn’t thinking fast enough. Clint tapped his ear, again and again, waiting for his comm to work. It wasn’t going to.

For a long moment he paused, not sure what the smart play was. Then again, smart had never been his thing. Then he plunged into his colleague’s pockets with both hands. He traded belongings amongst them and he smeared their blood on his clothes, and marked all their faces. He traded his and Matti’s wallets. SHIELD spent a lot of time and money making sure there were no mugshots of Hawkeye or Black Widow or Mockingbird floating around. He took Isabel’s chapstick out of her vest and put his whetstone in her pocket. Matti’s analog watch went on Clint’s wrist, the digital Seiko back onto Matti’s. Clint shoved Isabel aside and lay down on the tacky, coppery floor of the van. Matti was fairer, but with enough blood in their hair, it shouldn’t matter. He tried to remember everything he’d ever heard about Matti, who was from Ballard and whose family were exceptionally dour Lutherans. By the time the van rumbled to a stop, there was nothing to say that it wasn’t the body Clinton F. Barton laying beside Isabel Vasquez.

Matti Niemi, Agent of Shield (Level Two), lived again.

Matti Niemi was in the goon squad’s transit van. Matti Niemi put up a valiant fight. Matti Niemi was choked out by a ghost. Matti Niemi lived in a dungeon now, probably in a sub-basement of good squad headquarters.

After a week or two at Goon Squad H.Q., with all their tender mercies, Matti-Clint came to the conclusion that it had to have been Sitwell. It stung. But right now, Matti-Clint was beyond sure, Jasper Sitwell was debriefing with SHIELD and framing Clint as a turncoat and a betrayer, a former mercenary who killed two fellow agents, to escape with the objective of the Budapest mission. It was the last thing Sitwell had told them, before they discovered they were out of condoms: they were after a flash drive with the kind of intel that any one of them could have retired on. It involved money transfers and shell corporations and cryo technology. The kind of stuff the analysts creamed themselves over. What Clint didn’t understand yet was why he’d been chosen as the fall guy. He was an excellent specialist, peerless when he worked with Natasha. Of course, his aim was infallible, but there were others that came close. The Navy turned out some decent snipers. It didn’t make sense.

The interviews continued. Matti Niemi knew very little. Matti Niemi was a good soldier and held out for a week before giving up the little that he did know. The bed was hard. The water was cold. The food was...not terrible, actually. They stopped interrogating Matti Niemi. It was a long time even after that until Matti-Clint realized that no one was coming for him. Fury was a pragmatical and deceptive bastard, so it wasn’t unreasonable to assume he might have had to disavow Clint for one reason or another. Hill was the same, except with a sense of humor. She’d cut him loose, but she’d feel bad about it. Sitwell was close with them. But Phil and Natasha.

Natasha had imprinted onto him like some kind of razor-beaked murder duckling. They were more intimate than co-workers and friends, but lacked the effortless sexual chemistry that seemed to follow her around on little cat feet. Instead, she posted up in his shadow or under his arm or in his lap as some kind of living defensive maneuver. She watched his sparring partners with narrowed eyes and cleared his barracks room for him nightly. It had taken months before she’d stopped acting as food taster in the mess and Phil had to intervene after she caught Bobbi slinking out of Clint’s rooms one very early morning.

Phil. He and Clint weren’t together, really. Yet. Because that was the feeling Clint got, when they were on a transport together or they waited for the director or their eyes met in horror while Natasha told a ‘funny’ story from her youth. Not now, said the feeling, not yet, but soon. Clint had always loved older, competent, kind men. It was unclear whether that was just nature or Freudian nurture, but it wasn’t something he intended to exame to closely. But Phil was so much more than just competent. He was funny and sharp-dressed and he had the filthiest mouth Clint had ever heard outside the circus. It was just hiding under all that upper crust vocabulary and merino wool.

Six months ago, the two of them were re-certifying on Sno-Cats, above the Arctic circle in Bogen, when the small dormitory cum hostel, crowded with security personnel, went down with norovirus. Both Ends Bogen, was what Clint insisted on calling it, and it was funny right up until Phil found him passed out in his shower and then it was no longer a joke because he thought he might actually die. Clint woke up with his face in a scratchy pillow and everyone around him was speaking in tongues (Norwegian) and/or vomiting and no one understood or cared why he was begging for morphine.

“I’m actually gonna die,” he had said, into the pillow.

“You’re not gonna die, Barton.”

At great personal cost, Clint had opened one eye. Coulson had been there, hanging saline onto a hook behind the small infirmary bed. Then he had rolled up his sleeves, washed his hands thoroughly, gloved up, disinfected Clint’s inner elbow, and started an IV on the first try, even though Clint was so dehydrated his veins might as well be dried vermicelli.

“So good,” Clint had said.

“The fluids will help.” Phil had taped the tubing into place and stripped off his gloves. He looked tired.

“No, you.” He’d sounded like he’d been swallowing sand. “You’re so good.”

“Barton.” Coulson had reached out, his cool dry hand resting against Clint’s forehead.

“So good.”

“Clint.”

“Don’t go.” Immediately, he’d felt himself start to blush with mortification. He’d take it back. He’d blame it on the virus. Or the way Phil had looked while he rolled up his cuffs or something.

“Okay,” Coulson had said. “But you have to try some ice chips.”

“If you don’t go.”

“Deal.”

Both Ends Bogen had been the start of something, or maybe just the ending of the previous thing. Clint had found himself alone with Coulson more often. Natasha even appeared to be making an effort with their handler, proffering a mug of coffee one morning, which Coulson drank with the unconcerned aplomb of a man who had never read her kill list.

They were going somewhere, all three of them, but also Clint and Natasha. Natasha and Coulson. Clint and Coulson. They were going somewhere good. So where the fuck was SHIELD?

Even if he believed Sitwell, Fury would want to find Clint just to tie up loose ends, make an object lesson out of it. Hill would want to find him just for the satisfaction of having beaten Fury to the punch. Natasha, he was sure, would look for him, even if just as an intellectual exercise, for the rest of her life. She didn’t like to lose, not anything. But Coulson. Phil. Phil had held a bucket for him while he retched bile. For hours. Phil had hung a second IV and rubbed circles on Clint’s back, even managing to draw a curtain around them for some privacy, like Clint had privacy left to protect. He wanted to believe that Phil would come looking for him, just because.

So either the Goon Squad had hidden him real fucking well, or Clint had been mistaken about a lot of things.

  
  


**Southern California**

**2010**

Natasha hung back, the sturdy heels of her black boots sticking slightly in the linoleum of the interior of Randy’s Donuts. Corn syrup, probably. They’d read Stark wrong, that was clear. And she didn’t know why she felt compelled to turn around and give Tony a piece of the truth.

“You know.” She paused, perturbed by her own ambivalence. It was such a little, tiny, flinty chip of history. Behind her, the bell over the door rang cheerily, once. Fury was holding it open for her, then. Waiting.

“Know what?” Tony snapped.

“We weren’t always like this. SHIELD.” She met his eyes and tried to show enough there to make him believe. She thought about frigid barracks and shared blankets, terrible gas station snack food, gourmet coffee brewed under a desk, and a bloody night played out in front of the shocking teal exterior of the Omsk railway station.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. We used have heart.”

Then Natasha left. She was trembling as she buckled herself into the unmarked SUV. Fury didn’t comment on it until she had to physically clasp her hands together to keep them still.

“Everything okay?” His tone was mild, almost droll.

“I’m having a feeling.”

He turned to look at her full on for a moment. She’d forgotten--this wasn’t their shorthand. It was Delta’s. Phil’s. Clint’s.

“This happens sometimes. It just happens” she said, hugging her elbow tighter, “when I have an...unexpected internal experience.” That was how Clint had needed to explain feelings to her, after he brought her in, reassuring her, helping her cope with what felt like a mortal onslaught of psychic turmoil. Nothing but an unexpected internal experience.

“O-kay.” Fury drawled. “How long does this go on?”

“Not long.” Her heart, maybe metaphorically, squeezed painfully. Well. If she couldn’t trust Fury, she was probably fucked anyway. “I think this is a sad feeling?”

“But you’re not sure.”

“No. I’ll be sure in an hour or so. I’ll figure it out later. I’m slow.” The admission was bitter in her mouth.

“Huh.” Fury didn’t look put out. He just backed out of the parking spot and began to drive. “This ever happen on missions?”

“Never,” she assured him. “Not even Budapest.”

To her surprise, he reached a hand across, setting his elbow on the armrest. She stared at it.

“Don’t leave me hanging, Romanov.”

She peeled her bloodless left hand away from her elbow and put it into his. He interlaced his fingers with hers: long, calloused, and warm. Almost against her will, she squeezed it gently. Nicholas J. Fury, one-eyed Director of SHIELD, badass motherfucker, squeezed back.


	2. Chapter 2

**Downtown Chicago**

**2007**

Natasha waited until Fury unholstered both his handguns, unloaded, and cleared them. He looked tired and older than usual, an impression which was only reinforced when he removed his eyepatch as well, tossing it onto the rich wood of the hotel dresser.

“Long day?” she asked mildly and quickly threw herself sideways as a knife buried itself in the back of the extremely plush sofa where she was seated.

“Jesus Christ on a Panzer!” he said, with more disgust than surprise. “How the fuck did you get up here?”

“I sent myself up to your room. As a strippergram.” Natasha sat back up, plucking a feather off her shoulder.

“A strippergram.” He was resolutely looking at her face.

“There’s not a doorman alive that would deny entry to a strippergram.” 

“At the Ritz.”

“Especially not the Ritz.” She stood up and watched carefully as Fury realized he could no longer avoid looking below her collar bones. The silk of her short, dove gray robe parted to reveal a delightful vintage style teddy, in flamingo pink lace.

“You know,” Fury said, after clearing his throat, “some people don’t think redheads look good in pink.”

“What do you think?” She raised a careful eyebrow. Natasha knew she looked delectable because she felt delectable, like a perfectly iced pastry. There was a very strange expression on the Director’s face. The moment balanced precariously.

“I think,” he turned away, towards his duffel, “that I have a shirt that might fit you.”

A few moments later, her new favorite lingerie was entirely swallowed up by a green New York Jets hoodie. It smelled like Bay Rum and she immediately identified a desire to leave with it.

“Hm,” she said. It was a noise of both disapproval and puzzlement.

“No offense,” Fury said. “But now I have to draft a security memo about strippergrams. It takes some of the fun out of it.”

“I can appreciate that.” 

He snorted. “You sound like Coulson.”

She shrugged, because it was true, and there was a long pause.

“So you’re not here to kill me?”

“No.” She blinked in surprise. “We just needed a secure place to talk.”

“Okay. We?”

“And the room is secure,” Natasha went on. “I think someone from the Company was here earlier. Bugs in all the usual spots, but as usual nothing too creative.”

“Mike,” he said with disgust. “I’ve lost count of how many times that beady-eyed little fuck has tried to wiretap me without a warrant.”

That made her smile. The thought of a FISA judge reviewing a warrant for Nicholas J. Fury was...adorable. The theater of the rule of law was a constant delight. It was a pantomime, but men like Fury and Coulson treated it with great gravity. Americans.

“You want to talk? Let’s talk.” He pulled the chair away from the room’s solid wood desk, rolled it to face her sofa, and took a seat.

“Coulson’s worried.” Natasha bent her legs into a half lotus. 

“Coulson was born worried.”

“Yes,” she admitted. Coulson worried because people like her didn’t. “But it works for him.”

“What’s he worried about now?”

“He thinks you lack conviction.”

“Excuse me?” Fury leaned forward, elbows on knees, and the room’s barometer plummeted.

“I said,” Natasha enunciated clearly. “Coulson is concerned that you lack conviction.” It never paid to show fear to another predator.

“And why,” he asked, just as carefully, “does he believe that?”

“Because you misplaced his specialist.”

“I did not misplace shit, Agent Romanov.”

“Then where is he?” 

“Did you check under the bed?”

“I checked under this bed, the bed in Columbia Heights, the bed in Westchester, and the bed in Quebec.”

Fury blinked. “You know about the bed in Quebec?”

“It’s the Louise Penny,” she said flatly. “You own too much Louise Penny.”

“The Louise Penny collection is on a bookshelf in Bozeman.”

“I checked under that bed, too.” She tried not to look too smug. She failed. Also, she thought _A Fatal Grace_ was a near perfect mystery novel. She wondered if Fury saw himself in Gamache at all. She did.

“Fine.” He sighed and leaned back in his chair, ready now to take her seriously. About time. “Coulson thinks I lack conviction? I think Clint Barton killed my agents, raided a safehouse for the cash, and rode off into the Hungarian sunset.”

“No, you don’t.” Her tone was poisoned with derision.

“Convince me.”

“Clint Barton doesn’t leave. He doesn’t leave anyone, especially his family.”

“We’re his family now?”

“ _I’m_ his goddam family.” It came out sharper than she intended. Natasha took a deep breath and her cool demeanor resettled. “He doesn’t leave them even when he should. I don’t know how classified it is, but I’m sure you already know that Barney Barton had to shoot his brother in the guts just to get him to go away.”

Fury glared.

“Clint Barton is a kicked puppy. Kicked puppies don’t leave. They follow you around. And cry.” Natasha leaned forward. “I want. Our puppy. Back.”

“Message received,” he said, after a long pause.

“Glad to hear it.” She stood up. “I’m taking the sweatshirt.”

“Natasha,” her drawled, a little personality crawling into his voice. “It’s a great color on you.”

“Everybody likes green on redheads,” she said sourly. “It’s why I never wear it.”

“I wasn’t talking about the hoodie.”  
  


**Location Unknown**

**2007**

Goon Squad HQ was not a friendly place for useless agents. But mostly it was boring. He was in the cell a lot. They fed him maybe once a day and let him shower sometimes. But the truly inventive questioning had stopped. Clint was pretending to be Matti and Matti didn’t know shit about SHIELD. It was easy to resist pride-and-ego-down if it was someone else’s pride and ego. He was worried about being recognized, by Sitwell (fucking Sitwell!) or some other turncoat. But more than that, he was worried about losing it. Cracking up. Going round the bend. Misplacing his marbles. His cheese slipping off his cracker.

He spent a lot of time in his head, which was not always a safe place to be. He used every trick Coulson had taught him, then he moved onto Natasha’s tricks, and then, as a last resort, to the things that the SHIELD shrinks had tried to teach him. The least terrible of them, a wizened woman with coke-bottle glasses, had been into some real hippie shit. What was her name. Joyce? Joyce liked to talk to him while they worked on something else, untangling her good yarn or sorting art supplies. She was a bit of a space cadet and Clint had smelled brandy on her more than once. When he talked about sometimes feeling low, she lit candles and brewed tea and talked about auras. She had a sense of showmanship that comforted him more than any sober psychotherapist ever could. Which was probably why he felt enough of a rapport to tell her about the nightmares, the ones about the foster homes before the circus and the homeless shelters after.

“One time,” Joyce had said to him on a day she smelled like brandy, “I got committed to a mental hospital.”

“Oh,” he’d said.

“They’re very into routine. Routine encourages stability. Stability encourages sanity.”

“Sounds dull.”

“Oh, very,” she’d said. “I had post-partum psychosis. I tried to kill my baby.”

“Oh shit. Uh. I’m sorry.”

“These things happen,” Joyce had said, pushing her glasses up her nose. “I was in a straitjacket for a little while, until the drugs kicked in. And that was the dullest part of all.”

Clint had remained frozen, unsure what to do with this information.

“Sometimes, when bad things happen, we have to imagine them again. So when those drugs started to kick in, and I began to be more myself, I passed the time by putting the nursery back together. In my mind, you see. I had done a pretty good job of tearing the place up, so I just imagined putting it all back together. Slowly. In great detail.”

Sitting in his cell, hungry and dirty, Clint spent some time trying to put things back together in his mind. Slowly. In great detail. He’d done enough construction, both as day labor and cover, to fully invest himself. But there weren’t many places in his mind worth fixing. Eventually, he went back to the beginning, to Waverly. He went through the creaking farmhouse, room to room. He replaced the sink that leaked into the subfloor. He replaced the kitchen cabinets that leaned away from the walls. He replaced the creaking stair that warned him if dad was in a hurry, the window frame that had split the back of Barney’s scalp, and the bathtub where mom had, maybe even accidentally, almost drowned herself the summer before the accident. It took Clint months and when it was over and perfect, he tore it down in one glorious afternoon, with a wrecking ball and a mallet and a flamethrower. When it was over, only the cellar and foundations remained. 

When he heard business shoes rather than combat boots outside his cell door, he knew what it meant. He was ready for a blindfold. He was hoping for a blindfold and a cigarette. 

Instead, they handed him a mop.

 

The thing about being drafted into custodial service for The Empire, was that after a while, you started to look like just another stormtrooper. It was yet another reason Clint-Matti found himself pathetically grateful to be changing the urinal cakes. He had yet to find out what had happened to the last janitor working on the extensive sub-basement (holding cells, laboratories, and mad scientist medical clinic). He was not going to ask. That had been months ago and he had a kind of routine. Hell, he even had a jumpsuit.

In the mornings, they took him out of the secure cell, and shackled him to a Soviet era supply cart that probably weighed as much as he did. He was pretty sure it was morning, anyway, though the absence of natural light made that impossible to verify. In the mornings, Clint-Matti started with hard surfaces like desks, then moved onto vacuuming and mopping. The lab and clinic staff began arriving when he picked up the wet floor signs. Then he did the bathrooms and bathroom trash. Then it must be around noon because someone from the Goon Squad usually showed up with some kind of lunch for him. He was permitted to piss, wash his hands, and then he was chained to the cart to eat. Then he did spot work for the staff, sometimes even odd jobs, if they were considered too demeaning for Goons. Before they came back for him at night, he emptied the trash into the big bin on his cart. He never knew where that bin went. He never saw where the staff went. He had no idea where the food came from.

The chain was stout and so were his shackles. But he could have picked either one of the locks, if he had the privacy. Which is why they never gave him the privacy. They caught him fiddling with the shackles once, where they’d rubbed through the skin around his ankles, and he pissed blood for two days after that. He didn’t touch them again, just asked for a clean shirt so he could use the old one to protect the leg.

It was still a risk he would have taken. He kept two stray paper clips on him. He could do it, if he waited for his moment. But he didn’t know how to get out. He was stuck. If he thought about it too much, he stopped breathing and fell over. (In his head, Joyce reminded him this was probably a panic attack but he couldn’t afford panic attacks.) So Clint kept waiting. He watched and listened and learned and when he fell into bed at night, he reminded himself that even Head Goons would fuck up eventually. They always did. That’s what made them Goons.

In the meantime, though, Clint-Matti-Clint was in limbo. No, not limbo. Prison. Clint had been in jail before, a few dozen times, but he’d never done time. SHIELD had prepared him for a lot of things, from beyond-top-secret LMD briefings that might have been Fury’s idea of a joke to messy and painful death. But this. He didn’t even have a Rita Hayworth poster.

It was boring, but he was making it work. Until the mad scientists took an interest.


End file.
